So Nvidia claims they quit using the prefetch a long time ago, but there was just a settlement on grounds that they didn't? Time will tell, I suppose. Really, it's pretty hard to saturate the PCI bus with anything short of an old RAID card, I think. I wouldn't expect a sound card to manage it.

I'm not sure I buy the "less competition argument" in this case. Even if Intel is the sole chipset maker for their processors, they've still got competition in other areas. And those areas need good chipsets in order to maximize their own potential, which hopefully provides incentive for Intel to keep improving them. Furthermore, with numerous mobo makers using those same chipsets, there's still competition between them to extract the most performance/reliability from what they're given.

This can be bad for gamers and video editors - and those with Creative Labs sound cards like the X-FI, Audigy, etc, this will mean lag and crackling / popping issues - I wonder how much truth there is to this - this is NVIDIA's death warrant. VIA chipsets were so unpopular because of their shitty performance and crippled PCI bus, and now NVIDIA ? It is very easy to saturate the PCI bus you would be surprised - People who already have NLE editing cards, DON'T upgrade your BIOS !!! 2 layers of uncompressed SD, a graphic track, sound, etc, is quite enough to cause big problems. My next system IS going to be Intel, no doubt, I really like AMD, but VIA being gone and NVIDIA being in the shit, not that I have much choice, and certainly will not touch AMD's own chipset with a ten foot pole either.

Why do you say that ? VIA is gone, and if nVIDIA is gone, what does this mean for AMD ? This will also mean the end of AMD - You know what will happen then ? You guessed it - INTEL's prices will go back up (way back up) sinc eit won't have anybody to compete with anymore and hold the monopoly on CPUs. Seeing AMD is about to be faced with this lawsuit as well, so now I bet Intel is laughing their ass off now and screaming victory !

The only PCI card I use in my system is my Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality Professional series - and so far it works great on my NF570 SLI - This PCI prefetech thing is alleged to have been removed in 2007 and I don't even see that option in my BIOS, but I do know that a soundcard can hog the PCI bus - so I guess it's time to move along and forget about PCI and use PCie :) And in any case if you really are into NLE you should be using INTEL... So I'll enjoy my AMD for now and hope that my next sound card will be PCIe otherwise bye bye m*****f**kers ! :)

Yeah the cooling is what I don't like about it, but EVGA I love as a company for their support etc, I'm going to wait out the boards for a month and see where they go; if I do go with the EVGA I will definitely be looking at replacing that chipset cooler. I did order some memory and stuff for my new system though today.

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